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Saturday, June 30, 2012

Wonder and Paradox in Literature

Al Pacino played Michael
Corleone in The Godfather

When we surrender to works of art - whether a song, poem, film,
novel, painting or ballet – and let the artwork stir our imagination, we
are often changed in ways that are hard to quantify. Often the
experience may be difficult to articulate and may actually lose
something if we try to put it into words. This is what I experienced
when I watched the foreign language film The Lives of Others(warning: there is at least one inappropriate scene that should be fast-forwarded).

Sometimes we have to simply let ourselves experience a work of art
before we try to explain it, to let ourselves surrender to it in a way
analogous to our approach to persons. The way to get to know a person is
not to begin analyzing him or her, but just to enjoy the relationship,
to listen to what the person has to say, to empathize with the person,
to allow ourselves to experience life through our friend’s perspective.
In doing this, the horizons of our own personhood are expanded. It is
the same with literature.

When we approach literary texts like this, we often find that they
are laced with paradoxes and evade any straight-forward explanation. For
example, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, it can be tempting to
see Brutus as the villain and to then approach the play as a
straight-forward lesson about the dangers of treachery. But this
approach actually destroys the ambiguity of the play. If you take
Shakespeare’s play on its own terms, one of the things you have to
wrestle with is that Brutus is not a textbook villain, but is actually
motivated by good desires and wrestles with moral choices that are by no
means straight forward. The same is true for the character of Michael
Corleone in the iconic The Godfather films.